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In a March 19 email to the KIP team, NSS President Shrewsbury asked us to move all NSS publications into a "dark" archive inaccessible to the public pending a full review by the NSS Board during the July NSS Convention in Missouri.

The following publications are affected:

NSS News, 1941-2010 (760 issues)

NSS News Annual Index, 1948-1999 (50 issues)

NSS News American Caving Accidents, 1967-2011 (28 issues)

NSS Convention Publications (7 publications)

Speleo Digest (27 issues)

NSS Occasional Papers & Task Force Reports (5 publications)

In that email, Mr. Shrewsbury stated that the Bulletin of the NSS and the Journal of Cave & Karst Studies could remain in the publicly accessible collection. We sincerely hope that all of these publications can be restored to the public KIP collection. Because they are the most heavily used items in the collection, we believe that it is more important than ever to ensure that long-term preservation and access is ensured.

In response to concerns regarding public access to NSS grotto newsletters, we have "unpublished" all digital versions and placed the material in a "dark" archive inaccessible to the public. The KIP team has invested thousands of hours of work in digitizing and preserving these materials and we hate to see this aspect of the initiative go extinct, so we want to propose a way to move forward.

Grotto presidents* interested in making their publications accessible via the Karst Information Portal are invited to do the following:

download and complete the attached "Newsletter MOU Template" and send the signed copy to the KIP team at tchavez@usf.edu;

follow the guidelines concerning provision of physical or digital copies of your publication outlined in section 3b(ii) of the agreement.

If your grotto's publications were already digitized by the KIP team (see the List of Unpublished Newsletters), and you want to make them openly accessible via KIP, grotto presidents* are invited to do the following:

contact us and we will make the digital versions available to you for review;

redact sensitive information is accordance with NSS and grotto policies;

download and complete the attached "Newsletter MOU Template" and send the signed copy to the KIP team at tchavez@usf.edu; and

return the digital versions of redacted material only to the KIP team for inclusion in the collection.

A note about redactions: the KIP team adheres to a set of ethical best practices used in the preparation of digital collections. We rely on your expertise and sensitivity to the standards of your community to make these important decisions.

* We ask that grotto presidents only liaise directly with the KIP team on this important decision. We will assume that these presidents are empowered to act on behalf of their grotto and will do so after consulting with the membership.